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The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows

Why does the public think it's going up? “There is definitely more disorder in cities than there was five years ago," said one expert. “People confuse disorder and crime."

“It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest one-year decline in murder that has ever been recorded,” said Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who now studies crime trends. “After a terrible period of underfunding and understaffing caused by the pandemic, local governments have, by most measures, returned to pre-pandemic levels,” wrote John Roman, a criminologist at the University of Chicago. “The perception doesn’t match the actuality in a lot of places because people are bad at perceiving risk,” Asher said, adding that both traditional and social media tend to spotlight violence and disorder.

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